


As Others Do By Tenderness

by Hlessi



Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies), The Hobbit - All Media Types, The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Attempted Rape/Non-Con, Dubious Consent, Ghosts, Hobbit Culture, I'm Sorry, Inspired By Tumblr, M/M, Possession, Possessive Behavior, Violence, mostly - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-17
Updated: 2014-09-17
Packaged: 2018-02-17 18:08:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2318564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hlessi/pseuds/Hlessi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What has that boy called up?</p>
            </blockquote>





	As Others Do By Tenderness

**Author's Note:**

> Based on [shamingcows’ au where hobbits can call up ghosts by reading their names](http://shamingcows.tumblr.com/post/97566387323/fauntlings-are-brought-up-on-made-up-stories-and). Preemptive apologies to shamingcows for perverting her beautiful story.
> 
> Please send me more prompts at [bilboisms.tumblr.com](http://bilboisms.tumblr.com).

The first day of Winterfilth came ever closer.

The lessons continued. By now his hands were calloused and coarse, and ached less when he'd been at hammer and tongs for a hot, tiring afternoon. Khuzdul came to his lips as easily as Westron or Sindarin, and he'd begun to enjoy the laborious task of transcribing the _History of the Kings of Moria_ in runes rather than letters. When he undressed for bed at night, he saw that the soft flesh of his belly and arms had grown tight and hard, and when he was first prodded awake in the morning, his fingers knew the braids so well that he could twist them with his eyes closed, half-asleep.

His shirt and waistcoat were replaced by a shirt, tunic, and coat. Bilbo had yet to give up on breeches, though trousers would not be much different, and he wouldn't hear any talk of boots, even when the sparks and heated detritus of the forge left singed hair and blisters on his bare feet. Apart from his own unwillingness, the neighbours already thought him fey, whispering _that queer Baggins boy_ behind his back. Put on boots like a Stoor and who knew what they'd say.

_What does it matter,_ They grumbled in his ear, but Bilbo would whisper back, _What if they send for my uncles,_ and that was that.

The little knife he used to pare his nails began following him. They would be on the table beside his bed when he woke, they would be there beside the basin when he lifted his face from washing away the soot. He would lift his eyes from his manuscript to stretch his shoulders and give his fingers some relief and there it would be, glinting in the candlelight. Then he woke one morning to find the knife on the bed beside his foot, clumps of hair scattered over the blanket. He wailed, and then he ran in his nightshirt and loose hair to the front door and struggled to open it, too desperate to feel the pulling at his shoulders and arms, the pinching at his ears and hair. There was a terrible argument over his head, most of it in guttural, gnashing Khuzdul that Bilbo could not follow, but the end of it was that the knife stopped following him and for several days afterwards he could drop a hammer or blotch a rune without being shouted at.

Bilbo's hair grew over his neck and then his shoulders. He had not had hair so long since he was a babe, and to feel it always against his neck and his back was peculiar and irritating. He did not know if he liked it, particularly when it began to be put to use. When he made mistakes, he'd be given a sharp and reprimanding yank, or, when he did well, a not much gentler tousle. Sometimes he woke in the night to feel his hair moving against his skin, moving as though through someone's fingers, and the soft dark of his bedroom was filled with a sonorous singing.

By Rethe, when the snows had stopped, he was, somehow, a proficient metalsmith. He was tolerable with copper and lead, and good enough at iron. As a bladesmith, with small knives and short swords, he was barely serviceable, and They told him that the trouble was not with his hands but with his head. Perhaps he could have done more as an armourer, but his steel was full of impurities and unfit for anything but the lowest work. He needed a better forge, and a real finery, and quality ore rather than the trash he'd been buying cheap in Bree, but none of that would help him if the craft was not in his heart.

Yet he worked gold easily and well, and he had a canny eye for silver. The only thing that held him back was that hobbits had never cared much for precious metals or stones and so it was more difficult to buy any useful quantities of it; he had to get what he could when he could, and wait for what luck or chance could bring him. It was some months before he had enough for his first silver ring, and then he could not resist sending away to the Blue Mountains for several ingots of gold, an extravagance that had tongues wagging from Hobbiton to Buckland. By the end of Astron, it was decided that Bilbo would be a goldsmith.

At the beginning of Thrimidge, he stopped sleeping alone.

_No,_ he would whisper, when he felt the bed move with the new weight. _No, not yet._ If he closed his eyes, he could have sworn that there was someone lying beside him, behind him, someone much bigger than he, someone with rough, heavy hair and long, hungry arms. _Not yet,_ he would say.

Thrimidge. Forelithe. Afterlithe. Wedmath. Halimath. And then Winterfilth, when the leaves were turning and the nights become cold enough for a fire.

_The first of Winterfilth,_ Bilbo had said. Afhumranj, the Double Praise month. _Then I'll be old enough. Not until then._

It had seemed enough, then, in Afteryule, eight whole months away. Now half that time was gone, and the cold crept into Bilbo's bed every night as he tried to sleep. The cold stroked his hair and cheek and held him close by his waist. The cold pulled his nightshirt up to his thighs before he kicked himself free.

The air of the study grew thick with disapproval. The items of gold he'd placed or lost in there were arranged and rearranged every morning, and sometimes left in a bad-tempered heap. Maps were ruined as the same route was inked over and over again until the nib of the quill had torn through the parchment. Jagged, angry scratchings scraped the southern edge of the Greenwood and a point at the centre of the Misty Mountains off the world entirely.

Bilbo's relatives stopped visiting in Forelithe. They made excuses, gave no reasons, but in any case Bilbo suspected he would know better than they. Even his Tookish cousins stayed away. As unusual as they were, there seemed to be something in the sight of Bilbo, with his long hair, his braids, his calloused hands, his singed feet, his slightness, the small forge behind the smial and the deliveries of ores and books from Greenholm and farther afield, that made even Tooks nervous.

_Poor boy,_ they would say, for their own ears as much as anyone else's, _losing his parents so young._ Without looking at each other, for fear that they would have to see in each others' eyes what they were really thinking, the question no one was asking: _What has that boy called up?_

Mid-Afterlithe, a bar of silver came for him from Greenholm, ore that bore the stamp of the dwarf-mines of Khagolabbad Fahamu. With it was a small pouch of blue sapphires of matchless purity, for which Bilbo had paid an obscenely unfair price. When held close to the eye, or examined through a glass, it was just possible to see where the clan sigil had been removed, the gouges polished away. The silver and the sapphires waited for him in his father's strongbox. Bilbo avoided them, though exactly why he did so he could not have said, for it was childish to fear such things. Silver ore and blue stones could do nothing to him that he was not doing himself. Yet he felt uneasy with them, could not bring himself to look at them, and often he wished that he had never sent for them. He would rather have melted down his own spoons to use, and the sapphires were too much, too grand. They weren't meant for hobbits.

At night, Bilbo kept his eyes shut as hands like ice lifted his nightshirt ever higher and touched him more and more insistently. _Afhumranj,_ came the cold breath in his ear. _The ring._

He spent more and more time in his forge, but there was little sympathy to be had there, though perhaps it was more than he would have found in the study. Still, nothing came flying at his head, and he wasn't thrown out by the hair, so even when he was not putting his hand to some work Bilbo stayed, as quiet as a mouse, avoiding his bedroom, avoiding the silver and the sapphires. Sometimes he would close his eyes, and drowse to the ringing clangour of hammer and metal and anvil, or the song of a sharp blade cutting the air. Sometimes he would sit and try to make sense of the moaning.

In Wedmath, Uncle Isengrim came to see him.

“Bilbo,” said Isengrim, and then his words seemed to fail him. He stared at Bilbo, at the braids, the hair down his back, the heavy sleeves and the leather tunic, the silver belt. His eyes, appalled, took in the thinness of Bilbo's face, his narrow waist, the short hair on his feet. The scars on his hands, the burns.

_“Undad,”_ said Bilbo, and then corrected himself. “Uncle.”

“Lad,” said Isengrim. His voice shook. “Bilbo. Bilbo, what have you done?”

From the study, Bilbo heard the thuds of a book being hurled against the wall and then falling to the floor. By Isengrim's expression, he heard it too. “It's all right, Uncle. I'm fine.”

“You're lying.” Isengrim's eyes, so like Bilbo's mother's, were accusing. “What have you done? What did you read?”

Bilbo opened his mouth to contradict his uncle, and then he hesitated.

_If it's Isengrim,_ he thought. _If it's Isengrim, then, maybe..._

Years ago, when Bilbo was only thirteen, Isengrim had been the one to put the first longfather-tree in Bilbo's hand. Isengrim, the eldest son of nine, the head of a large and long-lived family, whose three sisters had all had the Sight. He'd scolded Belladonna, his most wilful sister, for keeping her only son illiterate for so long, for thinking that by denying her boy his letters she could somehow deny him danger.

I don't care, she'd shouted at Isengrim. I don't care! You don't hear them, you don't see how they catch at him! You don't see them standing over his bed, sucking at his breath while he sleeps!

Do you think that will stop if he can't read? Isengrim had answered. You'll only leave him ignorant. Defenceless.

Belladonna had raged, Belladonna had ignored, and then Belladonna had died. And Isengrim had taught Bilbo to read.

_Isengrim could do it,_ Bilbo was thinking now, thinking for the first time. _He could expel them. He could read them away. He is thain._ The possibility made him tremble. To be free of the weight in his bed, the icy hands between his legs, the silver and the sapphires. To be free of the promise he'd made without knowing what he did.

Bilbo opened his mouth to say _Help me._

Without warning, Isengrim's head thrust forcibly to one side, as if someone had seized him by his hair. He cried out hoarsely, the muscles of his neck bulging, and then he was heaved back in the opposing direction. The side of his head struck the wall beside him with a wet thump.

Bilbo screamed and fled. He ran from the entrance hall and toward his bedroom, screaming and sobbing and stumbling over his own feet. From somewhere in the distance, from outside the smial, he heard a pealing as of bells, the bright carillon of a hammer striking metal.

Father's strongbox was at the foot of his bed. It was unlocked, and Bilbo flung back the lid. There were few things in it now. The Baggins longfather-tree, which had been Bungo's as the head of the family. A copy of the Took longfather-tree, which had been Belladonna's. The silver bar and the sapphires, which Bilbo now took up and threw at the wall, weeping. And there, at the bottom: a bent and broken sheet of beaten copper, green with age and cut with near-illegible runes.

Heart pounding with fear, Bilbo took up the sheet. He could now read most of the Khuzdul easily, as opposed to the gibberish it had been before. His eyes sought a particular line, better preserved than any of the others. He did not know if it would work. It had not before, the effort doing nothing but provoking Them to anger. But then Bilbo thought of his uncle, and the look on Isengrim's face as his head struck the wall. Hatred filled him like bile.

“Go back,” he cried, “go back, Fre—”

The blow was to the side of his head, just as with Uncle Isengrim but from a hand instead of a wall. Bilbo was knocked from his knees, the copper sheet clattering back into the strongbox. Ringing filled his ears.

Bilbo wept, dazed and despairing, until he felt something grip his ankle. The grip pulled him from the wall he cowered against, stretching him out on the floor on his back. “No,” he mewled, “no, oh no, no.” He kicked, and hit nothing. When he tried to raise himself on his hands, they were dragged out from under him by the wrists.

“No,” he sobbed, and pressed his legs together. There was a moment where nothing happened, and Bilbo lay on his back with his wrists pinned, gasping and whimpering, and then he felt something cold push at him somewhere impossible.

He could not speak. He could not breathe. He could not think. He didn't understand. He was clothed. His legs were locked. How—?

Then he did understand, and he began screaming in earnest, _No no no no no,_ fighting hard even though he knew now that it didn't matter, but the cold did not go away, it only pressed even closer, and _No no no please not yet no not now not now not now—_

_Bilbo,_ the cold whispered to him, _Bilbo. Treasure of treasures. You are so warm._

Bilbo convulsed. His head fell back, the beads in his braids clacking, his eyes showing the white. His breath was shallow, his body limp. The grip on his wrists tightened until his hands were numb.

A deep, rasping voice said _Stop._

The bedroom was full of growling Khuzdul. Bilbo heard it as if from over a great distance, the voices from the air. He realized that his wrists had been released, that there was nothing pressing against him anywhere now, but instead of relieved he felt dull and slow. His head hurt, and his wrists; there was a weakness in his arms and legs, and he could not feel his fingers. He wondered if he was dying.

Something heavy dropped onto his stomach. Through his tears, Bilbo recognized the bar of silver ore, cast with the mark of the mine from which it had been delved. The leather pouch of sapphires, sold and bought so dear, clinked down beside it and slid onto the floor.

_Take up your hammer,_ said the one-eyed Dwarf. _You are to be wed._

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from "The Ghost"/"Le Revenant" by Charles Baudelaire, trans. William Aggeler.
> 
> I don't know what's wrong with me either.


End file.
